Despite its provocative and militant title,
Queering Christ
is a discursus on the nature of theology as an academic discipline
within the field of Queer Theory and not a call to despoil the
Christian religion or a revelation of new clues to the sex life of
Jesus. Though, in fact, it does contain elements of both—including some
interesting hints into the practice of nude baptism.

Robert Goss is a former Jesuit priest. Accounts of his experience in
Catholic religious life weave in and out of his presentation. He’s left
the Order, but he remains clearly a professional religionist. He is
Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Webster University in
St. Louis and practices his priestly ministry now through M.C.C. not
the Roman Catholic Church. With a doctorate in Theology from Harvard,
he is clearly a well-trained academic. This turns out to be both a
strength and a weakness of the book: Goss speaks authoritatively and
brilliantly about
his subject, but the scholarly nomenclature of postmodern Queer Theory
demands close attention by the reader—and, sometimes, the ability to
decipher the in-house jargon of the academy—in order to understand what
it means.

Starting with an autobiographical chapter, Goss argues that a sexual
theology necessarily involves the personal experience of the
theologian. This is surely one of his strongest points. It’s a new
thing that theology would consider personal experience. Traditionally,
Christian theology has looked to the bible or the teachings of the
Church to find truth, not the personal experience of actual human
beings. That’s why it could be so totally off-base about sexuality and,
especially, homosexuality.

Goss makes a good case for how off-base the Church has been by
recounting his own religious life formation. From the practice of
custody of the eyes (which, in the name of preventing “cruising,”turned
out to mean looking at the other seminarians‘ crotches instead of their
eyes) to that of self-flagellation (which Goss speculates was a form of
masturbation) to meditation on the near naked body of Jesus, priestly
training seemed designed to confuse and “pervert” natural sexual and
emotional feelings.

At the same time, Jesuit life offered possibilities for real sexual
experience. Goss quotes his friend and fellow ex-Jesuit Joseph Kramer
(creator of the Body Electric Training) that religious life was
“homosexual heaven.” His training matured him positively, in spite of
the confusing messages. It gave him opportunity, for instance, to work
in a leper colony and in Mother Theresa’s House of the Dying Destitute
in Calcutta. It also introduced him to his first long-term lover and to
personal experience of the layers of complication that HIV has added to
contemporary gay life. The account of his lover’s dying, his own
grieving, and then learning to love again provide a human, feeling
oriented foundation for the more abstract discussions that follow.

Goss’s goal is to “queer” theology. Queering, he says, is a method. “To
queer” means to spoil or interfere with. And the way Queer Theology
“queers“ traditional religion is to spoil an already spoiled system to
make it more inclusive of folks disenfranchised from Christianity.
Since religion is dominated by white, middle-class, heterosexist
values, queering it would mean opening it to the experience of the
whole range of minorities who don’t fit those values, especially
queers, including gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals,
transgenderals, etc. The “etc.” is important because the point is that
sexual experience and sexual identity are multiple and fluid.

Traditionally, religion has not taken that kind of purview of human
nature. A queered theology is necessarily a theology of liberation,
written and practiced in the struggle not only against misogny,
homophobia, heterosexism and AIDS-phobia, but also racism, classism,
militarism, and ecological domination.

Queering Christ, as the subtitle indicates, is composed of articles
written over the nearly ten years since Goss’s important gay genre book
Jesus ACTED UP: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto appeared. (There’s a
forgivable flaw in the stylistic differences between chapters that
results from such origin and the occasional repetition.) In that first
book, Goss argued that Christianity was not the enemy of the gay
community; rather the churches are the enemy. Gay/lesbian theology has
to be dissident, political, proud, erotic, defiant, activist, and,
because of its origins in the teachings of Christ, centered on
justice-love. This challenges Church authority precisely like Jesus’s
ministry 2000 years ago challenged the authority of the Temple and the
Law.

The various discussions in the book include the (fe)masculinizing of
priests (making them battered wives in cycles of ecclesial abuse),
barebacking, anal sex, queer families and procreative privilege, the
physicality of Christ, homodevotion to Jesus, theBi/Christ and the
Trans/ and Transvestite/Christ, the biblical “texts of terror” that
have been used against homosexuals, and the development of queer
approaches to theology in contemporary queer theory and academic
theological training and discourse. Lots of material with some very
interesting points and tid-bits!

Such an interesting tid-bit, seemingly hinted at in the book’s title,
is a discussion of the finding of a textual fragment from one of the
Fathers of the Church by gay biblical scholar Morton Smith that
arguably indicates that Jesus taught the mystery of the kingdom of God
(to Lazarus, the evangelist Mark, and others) through an erotic ritual
of naked baptism, and that the early Church may have practiced a
nighttime mystery rite of possession by Jesus’s spirit with homoerotic
dimensions.

This reviewer didn’t think Goss queered religion quite enough. Despite
his declared intention of recognizing the multiplicity of voices and
perspectives, he never rose above Christianity to look at it as but one
religious tradition among many. That perspective—what is loosely called
“spirituality”—allows for a much simpler response to the history of
Church and bible-based oppression: It’s all myth anyway, take what’s
meaningful to you and leave the rest behind. The point of the
mythological traditions is to raise people’s vision above just everyday
and selfish concerns and to inspire compassion. The proper goal of
religion isn’t to be right, but to be loving and kind.

If the bible says homosexuals should be stoned, it’s evidence the
bible’s outdated and inadequate for addressing issues of contemporary
life. You don’t need to explain the “texts of terror,” you can just
tear those pages out of the book. (Actually you might find it would be
simpler to just save the one page with Jesus’s Golden Rule on it and
throwaway all the rest. That’s probably what Jesus himself would have
done.) The message to be learned from observing the anti-gay attitudes
and behavior of the Christian churches is that it’s time to move on.
Let’s throw the baby out with the bathwater because the reason the
water is fouled is that the baby has died and the body’s putrefying and
deserves a respectful burial.

It’s not enough to queer Christianity. You’ve got to queer religion
itself. Robert Goss is obviously moving in the right direction; he may
be queering religion more than he realizes. You don’t come to the end
of this book to discover how right and wonderful and infallible
Christian doctrine is or that Jesus is your Lord and Savior. So there’s
another step to take: understanding Christianity as but one voice in
the conversation about spiritual meaning—and it’s got a very old-timey
accent. All of us, gay and straight, need a new spiritual paradigm that
makes sense in the modern world and speaks with a modern, enlightened
voice.

For queer theologians this book is clearly a must-read. It’s an
excellent statement of just what it means to do a queer theology. For a
gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans person seeking to find spiritual
meaning or inspiration, to cope with neurosis-producing childhood
religious indoctrination, or to learn to answer parents’ bible-based
harangues, the book won’t be very useful. What it is very useful for,
for those of us interested and fascinated by religious and spiritual
questions, is learning what’s going on within the institutional and
academic circles of theological discourse. If you’ve just heard Jerry
Falwell on TV, for instance, it’s refreshing and consoling to learn
that inside the ivory towers the theologians are talking about Christ
in a much different way.

Things are changing.

For all that Goss sometimes falls into incomprehensible (if very
precise) jargon, the autobiographical thread that runs through the book
makes queer theory and queer theology surprisingly accessible and
personally meaningful. You can see how he’s struggling to discover and
articulate that needed modern—pro-sex, pro-gay—spiritual meaning in the
familiar language of Christian myth. This isn’t an easy read, but you
might find expending the effort worthwhile

Reviewed by Toby
Johnson, author
of Gay
Spirituality: Gay Identity and the Transformation of Human Consciousness,
The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph
Campbell and other novels and books

Toby Johnson, PhDis
author of nine books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of
his
teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and
religious problems, four gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual
issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's
spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality and editor
of a collection of "myths" of gay men's consciousness.

Johnson's book
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000.

His GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was nominated for a Lammy in 2003. They
remain
in
print.

FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth
of the Great Secret III tells the story of Johnson's learning the
real nature of religion and myth and discovering the spiritual
qualities of gay male consciousness.